Valve have officially announced that the Beta for the overhaul of the Steam Library is coming on September 17th. Valve did a demo to some press outlets recently in a closed-doors session and now they've formally announced it.

This is something Valve have been working on for a long time and it is absolutely needed. The current Library feature of Steam is incredibly simplistic and when you've built up a bigger amount of games it's so a bit useless really.

Most of what's coming we already knew about, especially since you could actually try it out back in June thanks to a previous leak. From what I checked out personally, it was a huge improvement in just about every area of the Library system.

Image: Valve.

Seeing what games have been updated easier and the new events system should be interesting, giving developers a new big way to hook players back in. Valve said that today developers will have access to the tools required to make the events so they can be ready. More about the Events stuff here.

I'm most excited about the Collections feature, a much expanded version of the current and simplistic category system. Allowing you to do filters on features available and the genre, to have them pull in games that apply over time as you buy more, it is pretty sweet.

See the full announcement on a special page here. Valve said more info will come before the Beta starts.

There's also some new experiments coming to Steam Labs, like "Deep Dive" based on the Steam Diving Bell prototype from developer Lars Doucet (Tweet) which looks interesting. I just hope Valve actually get around to adding an Operating System platform filter to their experiments, as it's assuming everyone is on Windows right now for all of them. The Interactive Recommender for example, shows me tons of Windows games even though I only have Linux ticked in my Steam preferences.

Update: Also, it doesn't seem to have been announced anywhere I could see but it seems Valve are also doing some tweaks to store pages which seem to be live now. Here's a comparison:

Left: New, Right: Old.

The cover image on the news item gives it a bit more attention, it also seems it can be animated. You can hover over to get an excerpt too:

When you click on it it, you're given an overlay instead of a new page too like below:

However, if you're now directly linked to an update the whole layout has changed too. Here's how, click to enlarge the pictures:

Valve did say some of the new tools were rolling out for developers today, so this seems to be part of it. Since the new Steam Library design will show the "What's New" section (first image at the top), it's likely being shared here.

Update #2: Valve confirmed in an email to GamingOnLinux that the Steam Library Beta will be available through the usual opt-in Steam Client Beta and it will go live for all platforms (Linux included).

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Really good for them that Epic is even slower in bringing out new features ;)

Anyway, it really does look better - and I hope it will let me disable that "recent news" section (or it will be gone altogether), as all that gets filled with is "quality journalism" from RPS and the likes.
Not exactly interested in reading the latest political hot takes in my Steam library...

This looks quite promising. I don't hate the Steam client, but organizing the games into categories leaves a lot to be desired and the page for each game in the library is a wasteful mess. Organizing the games takes a lot of work and the filtering isn't really convenient. The game page shows little useful information, and what is of interest is cropped in a way that makes it useless (such as seeing the workshop, your achievements, or the links to the store page and community). Some things, like the DLC section and a weird feed of news from various places, I never used.

The idea of "Events" is cool. I can think of many games that had cool events/releases/updates I wanted to know about, but I found out through other channels - often through Steam itself, but on the store page instead of the library. If they don't spam too much, this could be great... particularly for indies that get less mainstream attention but could reach their own players.

Now what I really want is some change to the wishlist. Either allow us to have multiple lists or give us some organization tools besides just sequential numbering.

Am I the only one that look at this with spectisism?
I hope this goes smoothly, hopefully the updates and all the cruft they are adding won't eat a lot of resources and won't eat a lot of bandwidth. I like the way my library is right now, everything is snappy.
And what about the offline mode? this looks like everything is server based.

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